Mobile web access is becoming a common way for viewing websites as more mobile devices are sold that are capable of accessing the web. Since websites are typically designed to be rendered on a non-mobile browser on a computing device (e.g., a desktop, laptop, etc.), they may not be optimally designed for viewing on a mobile browser of a mobile device (e.g., a mobile device such as a smartphone has a limited viewing area). Many websites have a corresponding mobile version that is converted for mobile browsers.
One mobile conversion technique involves the use of automatically transcoding a page when requested by a mobile browser. This automatic transcoding typically removes all client-side scripts (e.g., JavaScript, VBScript) and does not support cookies. Thus, unless the web page that is being transcoded is relatively simple, the automatic transcoder will not include the same functionality as its non-mobile version. In addition, the automatic transcoding is typically not customizable by owners and/or operators of the mobile web page. Thus, the same automatic transcoding rules are typically applied to each web page regardless of the characteristics of that web page, which can lead to widely varying results.
Another mobile conversion technique involves the use of custom templates for a web page (e.g., an HTML page). For example, an operator selects elements from the non-mobile HTML web page and creates a custom mobile template to display those elements. The custom templates need to be created for each web page of a website. Upon receiving a request from a mobile browser for that web page, the HTML of the page is run through an extraction process (sometimes referred to as a scraping process) that requires custom extraction code to extract the specified elements and insert them into the custom HTML template for that web page. If the extraction process cannot find the elements it expects, the result is either missing information or an error page. Only those elements which are extracted to fit the template will appear in the mobile version of the page. If a new feature is added to the non-mobile web page, a new template (or a modified template) must be created and new extraction code must be written in order for that feature to be added to the mobile web page. In addition, if an element is moved on the non-mobile page, the extraction code needs to be updated with the new information; otherwise the mobile-web page will display with missing information or an error page. Thus the use of custom templates requires a significant amount of configuration. In addition, most optimization techniques that use custom templates do not include functionality for client-side scripts or support the cookies issued by the origin server.